Heading to my room, I strip down and take a shower under a frigid blast of water. I’m hoping it’ll clear my head or at least quiet it.
But it doesn’t do a damn thing.
When I step out, skin prickled from the cold, I’m just as confused as before.
Sleep won’t be easy tonight. I’m too consumed by thinking of Harper under this very same roof. But I don’t know if it’s because I want to be inside her all the time, or because my heart feels something for her that it refuses to acknowledge.
And maybe, just maybe, she feels the same thing for me. Which is why she keeps pushing me away.
Sighing, I emerge from the bathroom and get dressed quickly. Then before I can second-guess myself, I’m slipping out of my room and down the hall.
My feet carry me to a locked steel door.
When my head is heavy and filled with emotions, I find myself here.
I unlock it and drift inside. It shuts behind me, and the locks whir back into place.
I pause a few steps inside the room and listen for a moment. Medical machines beep and hum. The nurse on night duty glances up at me from her perch in the corner. Without a word, she scurries out through the side entrance.
When the room is empty again, I sigh deeply, then walk forward.
There’s a seat for visitors beside my mother’s bed. I sink into it.
She’s a wraith under the sheets. So skinny. So very nearly motionless. I wait until I’m sure her chest is rising and falling again. I do the same ritual every time.
It never gets easier.
“Mamma,” I rasp. “I’m sorry I haven’t been visiting very often.”
No answer, of course. I’m starting to forget what her voice ever sounded like.
“Things are… bad. Not just outside the house. I wish it was just outside the house.” I laugh bitterly. “That stuff, I understand. I know how to fight. I know how to conquer. I know how to run my empire. It’s the shit in here that is unraveling me.”
Beep.
Beep.
Nothing about her face changes. Nothing about her face ever changes.
I smooth back a wayward lock of hair. She was beautiful once. I have the pictures to prove it.
But now, the endless years on life support have sapped her of that beauty. She’s just too thin and gaunt and pale.
The door opens. I look up with a frown, assuming it’s the night nurse returning for some kind of check.
To my surprise, Mario shuffles through the door.
He looked spry earlier in the night. Now, he looks old again. Almost as frail as Mamma.
He finds a spare chair in the corner and brings it over to set next to me. Then he sinks into it with an old man groan.
“I’m waiting for the joke about how your knees don’t work the same as they used to,” I drawl.
Mario chuckles. “I’ll still outrun you any day, boy,” he says with a wink.
In spite of everything, I laugh. He’s always had a way of slicing through the darkness I gather around myself.
“You look troubled,” he comments. His eyes search my face.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
He laughs again. “I thought things were—what was the word you used?—unraveling you.”
My fists tighten on Mamma’s bedsheets. “Always nice to know I’m being spied on in my own house,” I snarl.
He claps a friendly hand on my shoulder and grins. “Wasn’t spying, my boy. I just came to visit, but you beat me here by a few seconds.”
I breathe and lean back in my seat. The strain of the day is catching up to me. All of a sudden, I am exhausted.
“So I’ll say it again. You look troubled.”
I look over at Mario. “Molly is alive.”
Mario nods solemnly. “It would appear so. Apparently, the Irish don’t like to stay dead.”
I can’t help laughing at that. “Apparently.”
But when the laughter fades, concern stitches itself back together on Mario’s face. “She’ll come for her daughter again, you know.”
I nod. “I know.” The thought has crossed my mind already. Molly won’t let Harper go so easily. Not only because of who Harper is but because of what Harper means to me. What she represents about me—a source of weakness.
The Irishwoman isn’t stupid. She saw the lengths I went to tonight to retrieve Harper from her clutches. You don’t do that for things you don’t care about.
“She needs protecting, Mario,” I say quietly.
“That she does, son,” he murmurs. “We need allies to help with that.”
“Fuck that,” I say at once. A knee-jerk reaction. “I can do it myself.”
Mario sighs. His hand hasn’t left my shoulder. He squeezes once reassuringly. “It’s not a sign of weakness to go to any lengths to protect the ones you care about, Marcello. The only true weakness is pride.”
I start to retort, but I end up swallowing it back. “You’re right,” I say instead. “Fuck, you’re right.”
“Pride hurts the very same ones you want to protect.” His eyes slide over to the woman on the bed with all the tubes running into her. Doing her breathing and eating and heart-pumping for her. “It hurt her.”
I know he’s remembering the night it all happened.
I am, too.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say fiercely.
He just shakes his head sadly. “Pride cost me my wife,” he whispers. He looks up at me. “It cost you your mother.”
“She’s not dead,” I fire back. “She’s right there.”
Mario shakes his head again. “You’re my son, Marcello. I was supposed to protect you. And I was supposed to protect her. I failed you both. Look at her. She’s not alive. Not in the ways that matter.”
The walls we’ve kept up for so long between us feel like they’re in danger of crumbling.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say again. My voice is failing.
Since the night of the attack, my father and I have kept up this charade. I am the don. He is an advisor.
But that’s basically just a bandage on a bullet wound. The easiest way of ignoring all the pain in our past.
The truth is that he is my father and that Mamma was his wife. That the things the Irish and the Russians did hurt us both far more than we have ever been able to admit.
“We can’t keep holding on to this,” Mario says. “You can’t go into the future if you’re clinging to the past. You can’t protect everything at once. We failed her, son. Perhaps it’s time to let that failure go.”
Tears prick at my eyes. Tears glisten in his, too.
His hand holds my shoulder. I put my hand on his shoulder.
Beep. Beep. The machines keep humming.
We both turn and rest our free hand on my mother’s bed. “Goodbye, Mamma,” I whisper.
I stand. Mario stays seated, whispering softly in Italian.
I leave him to say everything that’s left to be said.
Harper
In shock, I clutch the door, completely flabbergasted by what I just heard.
Mario is Marcello’s … father?
All this time, I thought Mario was just a butler or an advisor to Marcello, doing precisely as he was asked. But they always did have a very close relationship, now that I think about it.
How did I not notice before?
I swallow and stare at the two as they converse with each other about Marcello’s mom, who still lies in that frigid bed looking like a living corpse. And I can’t help but be moved by Mario’s words as they both clutch to each other and the bed.
I don’t mean to spy on them, but when I saw them both in this room talking, I needed to make sure it wasn’t about me. But what I’m witnessing now takes my breath away.
“Ci mancherai, Tesoro,” Mario says softly, his voice strained with emotions. I don’t even need to see his face to know the tears are rolling down his cheeks.
I lean against the door as Mario gets up and tears each wire from the machine, one by one. Marcello bursts out into tears, covering his face with his hand to hide them. And I can’t help the tears that spring into my eyes watching the two of them suffer.
Right now, I wish I could hold him and tell him it’ll be all right.
But I know it won’t be. I can’t do anything to fix this, and I can’t stop this from happening.
Within seconds, the beeps on the machines turn to full elongated screeches and then nothing as Mario turns off the switches. The silence that follows is deafening.
I’ve witnessed plenty of deaths before, but none has made me feel as weak as this one.
Especially when Mario walks back to Marcello and they get up to hug each other so tightly that it makes me cry with them.
I want nothing more than to go in there and hug them too.
But to do so would be to infringe on their privacy, and it feels wrong.
Besides, what can I do?
I can’t change what just happened.
I can’t take their pain away.
All I can do is watch in awe at how much emotional power it took to do that. To give up the one person you love the most.
“Mamma …” Marcello whispers.
“It’s okay,” Mario whispers back. “We’ll see her again. Someday.”
But then he looks up straight at the door … right at me.
My eyes widen as my breath falters, and I instantly hide behind the pillar, clasping my hand in front of my mouth to stop the sound from coming out.
But it’s too late. He definitely saw me.
Oh, God. Why did I have to look?
